A Creed in Stone Creek - Linda Lael Miller [49]
Matt squeezed his neck. “Melissa won’t say no, Dad,” he said. “She likes you, remember? She kissed you.”
Steven sighed. It sure felt good to be called “Dad,” though.
Reaching the bus, he opened the door and stepped aside just before Zeke shot out of the interior like a hairy bullet.
“One other thing,” Steven said.
Matt yawned again, watching fondly as Zeke ran in widening circles, barking his brains out. “What?” the boy asked, sounding only mildly interested.
Steven set him down, and they both waited for the dog to do his thing.
“When it comes to dating,” Steven said, “three’s a crowd, old buddy. You’ll have to stay home with a babysitter.”
Zeke raised a hind leg and christened the left rear tire of Steven’s new truck.
“Okay,” Matt agreed solemnly. “It’s a deal.”
When the dog was finished, Steven reached to switch on a light. Then the three of them went into the flashy tour bus with a silhouette of Brad O’Ballivan’s head painted on the side.
Within a few minutes, Matt was washed up and in his pajamas, his breath smelling of mint from a vigorous tooth-brushing session at the bathroom sink. Steven tucked the boy in and pretended not to notice when Zeke immediately jumped up onto the mattress and settled himself in for the night.
Smiling slightly, Steven stepped out of Matt’s room, remembering his own childhood. In Boston, he wasn’t allowed to have a dog—his mother said the antique Persian rugs in Granddad’s house were far too valuable to put at risk and besides, animals were generally noisy—but on the ranch outside Lonesome Bend, the plank floors were hardwood, worn smooth by a century of use, and the rugs were all washable. Nobody seemed to mind the occasional mess and the near-constant clamor of kids and dogs banging in and out of the doors.
There had been a succession of pets over the years; Brody and Conner each had their own mutt, and so did Steven. His had been a lop-eared Yellow Lab named Lucky, and when he arrived in the spring, right after school let out, that dog would be waiting at the ranch gate when they pulled in.
The reunions were always joyous.
The goodbyes, when the end of August came around, and it was time for Steven to return to Boston, were an ache he could still feel, even after all those years.
Of course, Brody and Conner had looked out for Lucky while he was gone, but it couldn’t have been the same as when Steven was there. Brody had Fletch and Conner had Hannibal, and that made Lucky odd dog out, any way you looked at it.
Summer after summer, though, Lucky had been there to offer a lively welcome when Steven came back, and the two of them had been inseparable, together 24/7.
His throat tight and his eyes hot, Steven tried to shake off the recollection of that dog, because he still missed him, no matter how much time had gone by. Lucky had been one of the truest friends he’d ever had, or expected to have.
Steven cleared his throat, then set about locating the drawings he’d been working on intermittently since he decided to buy fifty acres, a two-story house and a wreck of a barn outside Stone Creek, Arizona. Over the last several weeks, he’d redesigned the house a couple of times, and come up with what he considered a workable plan for the outbuildings, too.
Looking at the sketches, all of them scrawled on the now-scruffy yellow pages of a legal pad, Steven figured he was ready to hire an architect and start getting estimates from local contractors. Not that there were likely to be all that many in a community the size of Stone Creek.
He flipped through the pages, checking and rechecking. Somewhere along the line, he’d learned to multi-task—a part of his mind was still back there on that sidewalk in town, face-to-face with Melissa O’Ballivan, who might as well have zapped him with a cattle prod as kiss him, even quickly and lightly, the way she had.
The effect had been about the same, as far as he could tell. On the other